The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - Composition and Publication

Composition and Publication

Composed mainly between February 1910 and July or August 1911, the poem was first published in Chicago in the June 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, after Ezra Pound, the magazine's foreign editor, persuaded Harriet Monroe, its founder, that Eliot was unique: "He has actually trained himself AND modernized himself ON HIS OWN. The rest of the promising young have done one or the other, but never both." This was Eliot's first publication of a poem outside school or university.

In November 1915 (see 1915 in poetry), the poem—along with Eliot's "Portrait of a Lady," "The Boston Evening Transcript," "Hysteria," and "Miss Helen Slingsby"—was published in London in Pound's Catholic Anthology 1914–1915, which was printed by Elkin Mathews. In June 1917 (see 1917 in literature), The Egoist, a small publishing firm run by Dora Marsden, published a pamphlet entitled Prufrock and Other Observations (London), containing twelve poems by Eliot. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was the first in the volume.

Eliot's notebook of draft poems, published posthumously in 1996 by Harcourt Brace, has the dates "July–Aug. 1911" at the end of the poem marking him as 22 when the poem was completed. The notebook includes 38 lines from the middle of a draft version of the poem. This section, now known as Prufrock's Pervigilium, describes the "vigil" of Prufrock through an evening and night.

The Harvard Vocarium at Harvard College recorded Eliot's reading of Prufrock and other poems in 1947, as part of their on going series of poetry readings by their authors.